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mac macgillicuddy

This seems like a good opportunity for me to inject something I've been thinking about regarding the "Evangelical" argument for war. Or, if it's not, I'm going to take it anyway.

I was ill and recuperating in bed at Christmas time when the rest of my family saw the movie version of C.S. Lewis' "The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe," but I was finally healthy enough to watch it when they decided to rent it on Easter.

The movie, which was well done, or maybe the premise of the story--a premise of many stories that I've always been uneasy about--got me thinking about John Calvin.

Or maybe Milton. Or maybe just John (as in the author of Revelations)--although I and my pastor are heratic enough to believe firmly that the Book of Revelations is misread as a "Jesus is coming, and boy is he ticked!" kind of treatise--but that's another story.

Milton may have lifted the folklore behind "Paradise Lost" from somewhere, but it wasn't the Bible as far as I can tell. I do know that in his more ego-inflated moments (ha!) he saw his poem as a Third Testament, so probably he made the whole good angels vs. evil angels up. Amazing, though, that so many Catholics--and probably Protestants, too, though I can't speak for them--believe that this is actually FACT.

Anyway, I'll get to my point because I know I'm boring everyone: In the Calvinistic view, and Milton was essentially a Calvinist, so also in the Miltonian view--and in C.S. Lewis' supposedly Christian parable--there is an ongoing war between good and evil. However, good is always going to triumph; we just don't know how, and we don't know when. But Jesus is coming, and boy is he...well, you know.

So resistance is futile because we're going to holy roll over you.

That view is so nice for "Christian" leaders to exploit when they want to whip the rabble into a frenzy in order to stage a war. As long as the enemy is cast as "the evil," then killing them isn't a sin--any more than Aslan biting the head off of the White Witch was portrayed as a violent and perhaps unnecessary act to end the war (if you didn't see the movie, I think LM reviewed it a while back, or you can look it up to find out more about this war).

I think many Western wars have been fought based on this Miltonic view--which of course predates Milton, when you consider the fights the Israelites had with all of their enemies, up through the Crusades (Christians vs. Muslims...hmmm).

Certainly it's easy to conceive of a guy like Hitler as being the essence of evil--not human, not a physical body, but a force to be not merely defeated but destroyed if the universe is ever going to rest. Though I think that's giving even Hilter too much credit. But all of the other "evils" humanity has fought against...well, the jury is out.

OK, I'll wrap it up now, if anyone is still with me this far. Interesting that a non-political philosophy for living one's life in order to enhance one's relationship with the divine nature of God, a philosophy based on the OPPOSITE of waging war, of getting even, of biting the head off of your enemy before you can truly say you've won, becomes the politcal argument for doing just that. Maybe it's true that when Jesus comes, he will indeed, be ticked!

Ken Muldrew

While we're on the subject of lessons from the 30's that we're doomed to repeat, it seems that the complicity of ordinary Germans is a meme that could be profitably resurrected. You start small (torture, rendering, wiretapping, etc.) and suddenly you wake up to discover that your fearless leader is swaggering about claiming to be the only one with the courage to use tactical nukes in an unprovoked attack. It really is long past time to apply the defibrillator to the Congress and insist of a bit of oversight.

Jennifer

"although I and my pastor are heratic enough to believe firmly that the Book of Revelations is misread as a "Jesus is coming, and boy is he ticked!" kind of treatise--but that's another story."

Mac- what's the other story??

Linkmeister

I wrote a review of Phillip Roth's "The Plot Against America" where I maintained that he was writing an allegory for our current politics, even if he didn't intend to.

Roth's book posited that Lindbergh defeated FDR in 1936 or 1940 (can't remember which) and "kept us out of war," eventually creating internment camps for Jews in America, among other things. So much for "it can't happen here."

burritoboy

"So much for "it can't happen here." "

Er, one problem is that it DID happen here. In the Jim Crow South. People don't want to remember that the Jim Crow South states, were far-right-wing authoritarian regimes based on terror and oppression.

1. Far from being democratic, most of these states were one-party regimes. Voting was heavily restricted - of course, to blacks, but also very much also to poor whites. In most of these states, power has NEVER been actually turned over from one political party to another (except under military compulsion).

2. In actuality, the Jim Crow South was run by interlocking cabals of the Concerned Citizen's Councils (which also coordinated policies across the various states). Public politics was an entertaining sideshow to distract the populance, while real goverance took place in secret.

3. Decisions were enforced by oppression and violence. Beyond the known lynching incidents (which numbered in the thousands) and the unreported incidents (which probably also numbered in the thousands), political violence was frequently deployed on the behalf of the Jim Crow regimes against a wide panoply of these regimes' enemies (white, black, etc.).

Linkmeister

Amigo, upgrade your sarcasm detector. That's what I meant. ;)

Exiled in New Jersey

And on another tangent from the Thirties, isn't there something about our conservative stalwarts that resembles the French Right of that time, th e ones that preferred Hitler to Leon Blum. They subverted the Republic until they got what they wanted, the Vichy regime of Petain. For those doubters, look only to the interregnum of Clinton, when those on the right did more than become the "Loyal Opposition." Perhaps the only difference was that their gold did not flee the country, but was used to fund the takeover of the media.

The Heretik

Without sounding too heretical in this time of year when many believe a god became man and died to rise again, we need to remember that even the most evil among us is still a man. Or was a man. The capacity to inflate the evil of men beyond the human scale comes from the same dark part of the mind or soul that makes our enemies at the same time less than human.

So we adopt all kinds of superhuman efforts and often inhumane means to deal with these Others, all with great justification. Who believes they deserve an early heaven here on earth is usually the first to condemn someone else to hell. Oy.

a-train

billmon beat glenn to this post. but i'm glad to see the idea is spreading. i think this hitler/munich 1938 narrative has been THE major source of aggressive (and mostly useless) military action for the last 70 years.

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